sunshine / eye cancer

The weather in the greater Toronto area on my way to the airport this morning matched my mood: cold, grey, and snowy. There is no party like a lisa-pity party, and I am the queen of the revelling.

Back in the winter of 2010, when TSTBEH and I were living in a hotel for a few weeks while waiting to hear about whether or not we had Throbbing Manor, a piece of fluff landed in my eye. I could feel its prickliness in my eye socket and I could not, for the life of me, get it out. I took out my contacts, drowned my eyes in saline solution, and I still could not dislodge the fluff.

By this point, I started to become hysterical and nothing could calm me down. The fluff went from being fluff to my own convincing I had eye cancer. TSTBEH could not calm me down, even after several great examinations revealed nothing, I was convinced I was dying, or at the best, would lose an eye. TSTBEH forced me to take a Klonopin and within 20 minutes I was snoozing on the bed, calm for all the world to see.

I tell this story with great relish, and TSTBEH and I laugh at my own monstrosity of thinking I was dying. That’s how panic attacks work, in a nutshell, where something as innocuous as a piece of fluff in my eye speeds up within nanoseconds to be a death threat.

My world is always ending.

Last night was a night that rivaled eye cancer to the point where I called TSTBEH from Toronto hysterically crying. My world had crashed, again, and I had no one to hold me. No one to pet me. No one to make the pain go away. TSTBEH, not one to miss a beat, had me sing the 12 days of pugmas, to the tune of 12 days of Christmas, inserting the word pug for the items. E.g. On the first day of pugmas, my true love gave me to me, a pug in a pear tree. From one to twelve, I sang the entire song between hiccups and the odd crying, which finally calmed me down. I was hung over from all the Klonopin I had taken that week, so that was out of the question.

I was sitting in my seat, head pressed against the inside hull of plane, thinking about all of these things and lots more. The last week had been beyond emotional draining. I couldn’t cry anymore, couldn’t think anymore, and I had no idea where my life was going to go.

The plane speeds up and I love the feel of gravity pushing me back into my seat. This is how emotional flight feels; the pull of my stomach back that feels like I’m being manipulated by a puppeteer. I have no control over the emotional flight just as I have no control over the real one. I just let it go.

As we climb through the clouds, beyond the snow, my face began to feel hot. I cracked an eye open and saw the sun, shining so bright and clear, I had forgotten the feel of warmth against my skin.

I realised then, something that I’ve always known but had misplaced, that even when the sky is cloudy, that above the clouds the sun is always shining.